And it is difficult to avoid agreeing with her rather than with her mother, and thinking the most entire freedom of intercourse between the king and his nearest relations as desirable as it was natural.

Royalty is, as the empress herself described it, a burden sufficiently heavy, without its weight being augmented by observances and restrictions which would leave the rulers without a single friend even among the members of their own family.

And probably the empress herself might have seen less reason for her admonitions on the subject, had it not been for the circumstance, which was no doubt unfortunate, that the royal family at this time contained no member of a graver age and a settled respectability of character who might, by his example, have tempered the exuberance natural to the extreme youth of the sovereigns and their brothers.
Not that Marie Antoinette was content to limit the number of those whom she admitted to familiarity to her husband's kinsmen and kinswomen.

Still fretting in secret over the want of any object on whom to lavish a mother's tenderness, she sought for friendship as a substitute, shutting her eyes to the fact that persons in her rank, as having no equals, can have no friends, in the true sense of the word.

Nor, had such a thing been possible anywhere, was France the country in which to find it.